Chainsaw Man fans are currently in hysterics. While that statement could be ascribed to the fallout of any weekly chapter of Tatsuki Fujimoto’s madcap manga, this time around it’s over the series, apparently, approaching a sudden end. The cause of all the hysterics boils down to translation.
On the final page of Chainsaw Man‘s 231st chapter on Manga Plus, instead of being greeted with the usual “to be continued” text that accompanies every chapter, they instead read “Final chapter coming 3/24.” A machine-translated post from the official Japanese Chainsaw Man PR account on X/Twitter corroborated this, writing, “Next and final chapter is scheduled for 3/25.” However, fans who read the chapter on Shonen Jump, which they say had its translation changed by Viz Media, instead were greeted with the usual “To be continued” stinger.
io9 reached out to Viz Media for comment.
As you can imagine, fans are coping with the confusion over the series’ potentially imminent end with chapter 232 the same way the Smiling Friends fandom took the news of the show’s sudden end: by posting through it with memes. However, amid the meme posts about Chainsaw Man, there are some fan theories on both sides of the camp about whether this is truly the end of Denji and his adventures or the start of Chainsaw Man Part 3.
To say Chainsaw Man chapter 231 signalling the end of the series is sudden would be a touch hyperbolic. While the series has had its fair share of break weeks—the bane of fans’ existence and an understandable necessity given the grind of weekly manga publication—Chainsaw Man part 2 has been ramping down in a pretty temperate way. At least by Fujimoto’s standards.
After taking a two-year break from writing Chainsaw Man, during which he wrote the Goodbye, Eri, and Look Back one-shots in the interim, Chainsaw Man Part 2 returned in 2022. Instead of following Denji, as the end of Part One teased with the stinger text, “End of Part One: The Public Safety Arc,” CSM Part 2 followed a new protagonist, a girl named Asa Mitaka. Like Denji, Asa Mitaka is a social outcast who strikes up a contract with a devil. Specifically, the War Devil, Yoru. What followed in the first chunk of CSM Part 2 was a Fight Club-esque misadventure where Yoru and Asa swap control over her body as the latter lays her trap to fight and kill Chainsaw Man. What actually happens is that the pair serve as window characters into each other’s baggage while striking up a bad romance.
All the while, fans watched on as Denji felt like every step towards progress (i.e., recognizing his desire for sex was misplaced for his desire to genuinely connect with someone) inevitably led to him taking two steps back. Such is life! This continued for some time, at least up until chapter 230, where Denji snatched victory from the jaws of defeat, battling Yoru for a handful of cataclysmic chapters and checkmating her. While Denji still admitted to Yoru that he wanted to have sex with her (they’d made a pact over this when Yoru was clearly positioning herself as the latest woman to groom Denji with sex to get what she wants: control over him), he also admitted that he wants to be both her and Asa’s friend. For the fandom, this was the latest in a cycle of developments where Denji felt close to progress but never quite got there. As if something was preventing him from following through.
CSM chapter 231, titled “Goodbye, Pochita,” saw Denji talking to Pochita like the duo did at the start of the series. Only this time, Pochita tells Denji their dream life together is over, “But maybe that’s a good thing.” In their heart-to-heart chat, Pochita says it’s good Denji didn’t get to “have sex” and “unlimited kisses” because a part of Denji was always unhappy despite the connections he made at school and with Asa. Pochita then has a literal heart-to-heart by ripping out his own heart and stating he was going to eat it. Because Chainsaw Man as a devil can erase concepts by consuming them, Pochita is essentially saying the world will continue on as if he doesn’t exist. Pochita hopes Denji can continue dreaming without him.
My read of the situation is that Denji being caught in a regressive cycle of falling is because his promise to Pochita at the start of the series was a pact in which Denji said he’d show him his dreams. At the time, those teenage dreams were to eat jam on sliced bread, flirt with a girl, play video games, and fall asleep in a woman’s arms. I’m of the mind that Pochita saw the Sisyphean cycle Denji and his inverted pyramid of needs had him stuck in and decided to take himself out of the equation, freeing Denji to no longer be Chainsaw Man and just be, well, a man. One leading fan theory corroborates that sentiment, suggesting that Fujimoto always intended it as a goal for Denji.
In an interview with Da Vinci magazine, Fujimoto, a renowned cinephile, said he wanted the manga to have the same unresolved energy as The Big Lebowski.
“That movie really made me think, ‘What even was that?’ when I was done watching it. Nothing was resolved; wasn’t everything pretty meaningless! But still, the protagonist had development, and the story progressed; there was this sublime absurdity that I loved,” Fujimoto said. “I want Chainsaw Man to give the reader that kind of aftertaste, too. So on that note, I sincerely hope you read Part 2 as well, and I am personally quite looking forward to the animation as well, so please watch the anime.”
Considering CSM Part 2 is front-loaded with a ton of meta commentary about the massive influence the manga has garnered and its fandom routinely positing greater meaning in it like a Kendrick Lamar or Taylor Swift fan might ascribe to their lyrics—a theme Fujimoto played with in his one-shot, Just Listen To The Song—it’d be pretty fitting for the series to go out by having fans live in a world without CSM in the same way Denji might have to come chapter 232. However, another prevailing theory is that the forthcoming chapter is a setup for Chainsaw Man part 3, as the manga has had distinct chapter breaks like this before—supported by the fact that, as of writing, Manga Plus has now updated their version of chapter 231’s final page to simply read “to be continued.”
Although this theory could boil down to cope, it’s got a pretty solid basis to fall back on. Essentially, the penultimate chapter of Chainsaw Man Part 1 also had text saying the final chapter was coming. That chapter turned out to be chapter 97 of the manga, which announced the next arc of the series. And with Fujimoto being such a movie buff, it would stand to reason that history would repeat itself once more with chapter 232, leading to an announcement at the end of this current arc and a tease for a third arc. Given the confusion, Viz Media and Manga Plus’ version of the chapters hasn’t helped at all in calming this theory down; it is the most glass-half-full of the two fans who are currently white-knuckling.
For the time being, fans will have to sit on their hands for yet another break week until either theory is proven true or busted.
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